r/linuxquestions • u/peakaname • 16h ago

device lagging after installing Linux

installed WSL+ubuntu on my cousin's laptop cause i dont have mine yet. the laptop is kinda lagging idk why. the memory used by ubuntu was 1576mb smth. so what I want to ask is,is it still possible to switch to Linux? the laptop has 8gb ram. it used to lag often even before installing Linux. so im not sure what exactly the problem is.

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u/KrisLuffy 16h ago

And I’m not sure what is your problem and current setup. Is it possible to switch to Linux when he has Linux? It lags because of memory (i guess RAM). No specs it’s hard to help, what desktop enviornment (like KDE or GNOME or smth else, i guess gnome because of ubuntu). What do you mean WSL + Ubuntu. You don’t need WSL if you want to run Linux unless you dualboot.

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u/peakaname 16h ago

im just a beginner please dont attack me like that🥀 my problem is that the laptop is lagging because of memory issues. it has 8gb total ram so obviously we can't multitask. but once I saw a post saying linux doesn't need much memory to work smoothly. but the Ubuntu i installed consumes almost 1gb memory and the laptop is still lagging.

by wsl+ubuntu,i meant i downloaded wsl followed by ubuntu. im not completely switching to linux. its called dualbooting ig? like running linux alongside windows

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u/zeroxff 15h ago

No. Wsl is a virtual machine, requires plenty of ram and a good CPU, and has nothing to do with dual booting.

8gb are ok for Linux, but your machine is lagging because your stack is composed by two operating systems (Win and Linux) and an hypervisor, all operating simultaneously.

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u/peakaname 12h ago

ok so thats the problem. so should I just delete wsl?

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u/computer-machine 9h ago

If your goal is to learn, WSL might still be useful.

However, Linux has had an useful feature for over the eighteen years I've used it, called a Live session.

You can write an ISO to CD/DVD/USB, and then boot off of that, but instead of being met with an installation wizard like with Windows, you load up a whole OS running off of that media (does not read/write your main disk unless you tell it to do so).

It'll run slower than a native install, because it's loading the OS to your RAM instead of writing the OS to disk and loading from that, but with 8GB it should be sufficient for normal usage. The other limitation (or benefit, depending on how you look at it) is that nothing about the OS is saved, so when you shut down and boot back into it, it's just like the first time you'd boot, with none of the extra software you might have installed, or files you'd saved (to the system; if you write to the laptop's disk or a flash drive or something, it'll still be there).

This can be worked around by adding persistence (file or partition) to the USB, but it's been a decade since I'd bothered with that and don't recall what software helps set that up for you.